There’s nothing like the death of a famous (and at times infamous) icon to test the web. His passing caused a wave of slow service and even outages on popular web sites.
Outages were suffered by Twitter, the LA Times, AOL Instant Messenger, TMZ (who first reported of his death), even Perez Hilton’s blog site (gasp!). Giant Google felt the hit too. The number of Jackson-related searches caused the search engine to think it was under attack. Users had to enter a captcha in order to proceed. Wikipedia closed off edits to the MJ entry as hundreds rushed to put their 2 cents in.
According to PC World, the LA Times reported almost 2.3 million views in one hour. CNN got a staggering 20 million views. BTW, that’s more than the population of the entire state of New York.
According to CNET “Keynote Systems, a company that tracks site performance, is reporting that a review of more than 30 online news services the firm covers, shows that availability on average fell from 100 percent to 86 percent. The average time it took to access the home pages of top media sites jumped from 4.2 seconds to 8.9 seconds.” In this time of speedy connections, almost nine seconds would seem like an eternity. I’m not sure I’d even wait.
I heard about the untimely death of the superstar at around 5pm. I admit I was one of those millions trying to confirm the rumor online. Even after seeing it on several different web sites, it didn’t really sink in until I saw it on TV. I guess I needed to see it and hear it from an old fashioned source (old habits die hard).
I guess the “ah ha” about all this for me is that it makes us really look at the capacity of the Internet. If the passing of Michael Jackson can have this kind of impact… just imagine.
Erika Moskal
CNET
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